


it may be over now, but we feel it still

by elenoir



Series: and all of these stars are silent [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Homesickness, Idiots in Love, Jealousy, M/M, Misunderstandings, Pining, Shiro's still chillin in the astral plane but he'll get out eventually, klangst, season 7 who is she, so many meme references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-06-29 08:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15726084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elenoir/pseuds/elenoir
Summary: Lance tries again.“Country Boy, I love you.”“What?”“Never mind.”In which Lance is always looking over his shoulder, aiming for Earth, and Keith tries not to panic.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the third installment in the series, and although it’s not necessary to read the previous two, I’d definitely recommend it for context.
> 
> If you’re here for the memes, be warned that they’ve somewhat decreased in comparison, but they’re definitely there. Bonus points to the reader who can catch them all.
> 
> Enjoy.

 

* * *

 

“She calls him _‘Desert Man'_ ,” Lance exclaims, waving his hands animatedly. “What’s that about?”

“Maybe it’s a term of endearment?” Hunk suggests. “Or it could just be - you know, accurate. It _was_ a desert, and Keith’s dad _is_ a man,” he says logically, and Lance huffs.

“Yeah, but then why can’t she just call him by his name? His name cannot literally be ‘Desert Man’.”

“Again, _term of endearment,”_ Hunk reiterates. “Like, ‘snuggle-bear’, or ‘honey-bunch’, or ‘flitter-mouse’, or something.”

“The mice might take offense to that.”

Hunk rolls his eyes. “It could be a Galra thing too, you know. Maybe that’s just what they call their significant others.” Lance appears unsettled. “Why’re you so bothered by it?”

“I’m not... _bothered_ by it, she just brings it up a lot when we talk." It occurs more often than he would’ve thought - Lance isn’t complaining, necessarily; Krolia’s good company, and seems genuinely interested in what he has to say, although he suspects it has something to do with keeping tabs on her son through him. “Don’t tell Keith I’m making friends with his mom.”

“No worries. It kind of makes sense, actually. You two are a thing, and she probably wants to make sure that you’re not going to murder Keith in his sleep.”

“Do I look like I’d do that?”

“Well.…” Hunk scratches the back of his neck. “The two of you started out a little - volatile, shall we say? You guys tried to strangle each other at least twice a day, and that was even before the foreplay started.”

“What about now?”

“It’s kinda the same, except now you’re friends with his mom, and some of that unresolved sexual tension is resolved.”

“Some of it?”

“You two really need to establish a private line with your communicators,” Hunk says, looking pained. Lance opens his mouth, closes it.

 

* * *

 

Later, Lance tries again.

“Country Boy, I love you.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

 

* * *

 

“Am I old enough to start dating?” she asks nobody in particular, eyes trained on the ceiling.

Pidge cranes her neck from where she's situated upside down on the couch, limbs sprawled over the cushions with the grace of a newborn foal. Shiro chokes on his own spit.

From across the universe, her brother’s hologram steeples his fingers together, mock-contemplative. He looks like a cartoon supervillain, and when she tells him so, he only laughs.

“Is there a reason that you shouldn’t be old enough? I mean, you pilot a mechanical lion in _space._ You’ve done weirder things.” His tone is measured and reasonable enough, but she picks up on the bemusement of it all, and considers chucking a cushion through the hologram of his face in retribution. She thinks better of it.

He’s right, though, sarcasm aside. It’s not something to be worrying about, especially not at the moment, but...

But she's rescued planets and fought off aliens and picked her own body up off the ground and dragged it from death, and she’s only just picked up on her own lack of romantic experience, so if she was being very honest and analytical with herself, she might admit that it bothered her.

Just a little.

From the look on Shiro’s flushed face, the concept bothers him too. “I mean, I know that I am, but I just never really thought about it, you know?” Pidge continues, enjoying the way Shiro’s eyes flicker uncomfortably, longingly towards the doorway as if he’d give anything to vanish.

 

* * *

 

It’s hard to keep track of time in space, especially with the presence of wormholes and portals and so many different time zones. Time tends to get warped and turned inwards on itself to the point where even narrowing it down to the tick is nearly impossible to do without making some exceptions here and there, all of which threaten the science of the thing.

(“Time is more of a social construct,” Hunk had told Pidge once, “and the closest it can be to a physic is a measurement, which is used in any field, but the nature of time is mostly hypothetical. It’s more of like - I don’t know, a thought experiment. It’s all hypothetical.”

Pidge had gotten the vaguest idea that she disagreed, but she was too tired to come up with an answer to that, so she let it go.)

Therefore, it’s understandable that when Shiro raps on the door to her room looking both timid and masochistic, she looks back on the occasion within a frame of time that she remembers in parallel to other events:

Keith’s mother, Krolia, was still aboard the ship.

At the time, Lance and Keith were still bickering and every bit in love with each other as they were before Keith had left, Hunk was fretting over the state of his crème brûlée, and Pidge was not aware that the Shiro she was speaking to was, in fact, a clone.

This would change, in time, but it was something to keep in mind.

 

* * *

 

Shiro sucks in a breath and continues, sounding with every word as though he wishes for death.

“Someday, you’re gonna grow up, and be a woman.”

Pidge looks over her nose at him; he’s not wrong. “Someday, you’re gonna be dead,” she says.

“What?”

“Nothing. Carry on.”

“Right,” Shiro’s expression crumbles behind his bangs, and he looks like he wants to cry, just a little. “Well...look, the body goes through...many changes, and -”

She takes her eyes off of her screen; she’s currently working her way through some heavily-encrypted files that could be very important, and she’s sure that if he knew what she was doing, he’d want her to stay focused and not get distracted by silly things.

" _Stop. Wait._ Is this the sex talk?”

“No?” Shiro says slowly, looking as though he's in hell. She almost feels sorry for him. Almost.

“You’re not my dad,” she explains tiredly, far too patiently.

“You’re right, I’m not, and this shouldn’t be my responsibility, but here we are.”

 _You’re literally fucking insane,_ she’s going to say, but her attention is directed towards something else. “Did you bring a _pamphlet?”_ she asks incredulously, and he automatically hides it behind his back.

If Lance was here, she thinks, he'd be in stitches. If he was here, he'd probably _need_ stitches when she was done with him; after her annoyance faded away, the embarrassment would be long-lived. No one else could be a witness to this.

“Look, Shiro,” she pinches the bridge of her nose with a sigh, “I appreciate this, really, but I'm sixteen years old, and I don't need to hear this. Trust me.”

“Oh, thank god.” His shoulders slump in relief. It doesn't last long; he narrows his eyes and sits up straighter. “Wait, what's _that_ supposed to mean?”

 _“It means_ I've lived in space for three years of my life. I've seen some shit. I know a thing or two about reproduction. Enough said,” she adds at the scandalized look on his face.

“But, Pidge, safety is important, safety, _blah blah blah, blah blah,”_ he says, or, at least, that’s what she hears. _“Blah blah, blah blah!”_

Her eyes flicker from the files, back to Shiro’s face. He looks sick.

How does he do it, she wonders. How does he manage to keep his sanity, cooped up with four teenagers hurtling through space?

 

* * *

 

“Hunk, I think I’m going insane.” Lance clutches at his hair and flails on the floor of his room, clearly in agony. Hunk barely looks up.

“Uh-huh, and why is that?”

“Keith,” he says simply, muffled beneath his arms, which are now flung over his face in admittedly dramatic fashion.

It’s not the first fight they’ve had, not by a long shot, and it definitely won’t be the last, but this one was different. They’d come close to blows this time, and when Keith got in his face (not for the first time) and slammed him into the wall (not for the first time, either), it was entirely possible that Lance had hit his head a little too hard.

“What’s new?”

“We made out, that’s what’s new.”  _And we kind of admitted that we were in love with each other,_ Lance almost adds but stops himself.

“Oh, is that it?”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“ _Oh,_ is that _it?"_ Hunk tries again, this time sounding marginally surprised.

 

* * *

 

When Keith is eighteen, he falls in love with a Cuban boy who hates him without knowing him and is heartsick for home.

He laughs loudly and obnoxiously, and has a hold on all sorts of things that make Keith envious: friends, for one, family for another, and the odd, irrevocable ability to make people love him.

Jealousy is not a good look on Keith. It’s an ugly one, and one he wears carefully but always quietly, and when he’s snarling and whining like a dog in a corner he thinks that Shiro would be disappointed, and his own blood boils for the boy.

It’s this Cuban boy who ignites laughter and bleeds in the place of his friends in a single breath, and it’s this boy who makes Keith do and say ridiculous and true things that he wouldn’t have otherwise. Shiro tried to teach him this before and Keith knew that he was right, but knowing and believing are two separate things.

They save Shiro together, and then planets, and eventually the universe.

It helps a bit, to soothe Keith’s jealousy. This is good, because when he feels, it burns its way through him.

 

* * *

 

“I wanted to be a cowboy.” Keith admits, to which Lance lets out a loud _guffaw_ and buries his face in Keith’s shoulder.  
“Baby, no.”  
“What?”  
“You know, if you wanted me to stop making fun of your mullet, then the solution isn’t to give me more material.”  
“It’s not a mullet.”  
“Sure,” Lance agrees.  
“What did you want to be when you grew up?”  
“A Victoria’s Secret Model,” Lance answers without hesitation. “I’ve got the legs for it.”

 

* * *

 

These are the things he knows about the Cuban boy named Lance:

The names of his three siblings. The name of his mother. Where he grew up before landing in Phoenix, Arizona. His dominant hand. The order of the products he applies before his face mask. How brightly and nervously he laughs right before catastrophe, like thunder before a storm. The space of the millisecond between his aim and pulling the trigger.

His silhouette against the galaxy before even the stars blink out of existence, and Keith is plunged into the dark.

 

* * *

 

“I wanted a big house, I think,” Lance says. “Nothing extravagant.”

At this, Keith snorts.

“Really!” Lance says defensively, “Just big enough for - for kids, I dunno how many.” Back then, having children was a no-brainer. Family was something Lance was born into and would never shake off, and the thought of living alone invoked the idea of tragedy. He continues, eyes resting on their hands folded together. “And a swing-set. Maybe like, a tire on a rope or something. We don’t have one like that at home, but I always thought they looked really cool.”  
“Anything else?” Keith asks.  
Lance settles back and thinks for a while. “I wanted a dog,” he says finally. “I don’t know what I’d name it, but I think that I wanted a big one. Maybe a German Shepherd, or a water dog, like a Newfoundland. It might be fun.”  
“What about now?”  
“Hm?”  
Do you still want to go back to Earth, more than anything else, Keith means.  
“Are you still a dog person?” he asks instead.

 

* * *

 

“Listen, I’m just gonna say it; I don’t care that you broke your nose.” Pidge clicks her tongue, mock-sympathetic. “Keith really fucked you up, huh? Next time, you really shouldn’t try to proposition someone who clearly has a complicated relationship status. It’s not very poli -”

“Wait a second - the half-Galra broke my nose?” Lotor snarls and bolts up, livid. “ _Again?_ ”

“Wait, I interrupt people?” Pidge snaps, unimpressed.

He blinks.

“Yes,” she says shortly.

“Well, did you...set it back?”

Lotor tentatively traces the bridge of his nose. There’s no lingering pain, which is good, but he didn’t wake up in a pod - not so good. Clearly he received some kind of medical attention, but he doesn’t trust the glint in the green paladin’s eyes. He has half a mind to pat himself down to check for stolen valuables.

“You're gonna be fine,” Pidge adds convincingly, despite her eye roll.

Lotor raises an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced.

She doesn’t know it yet, but it’s _goddamn tragedy_ how wrong she is.

 

* * *

 

“You specialize in intel. Have you ever caught wind of an Operation Kuron?”

“Krolia, what's going on?” Pidge asks, intuitive but weary, and slowly opens the lid of her computer to insert the file. The screen lights up, and Pidge brings a trembling hand to her mouth.

Words jump out at her, flashing against the glare of the screen in the dark.

_Witchcraft. Clone. Multiple attempts. Hostile. Dormant. Kill. Instinct. Memory. Kill. Kill. Kill._

She doesn’t think he's capable of that sort of thing, and it must show on her face, because Krolia crouches down and peers into her eyes, dead serious.

“Think of him as a sleeper agent. Haggar plays all sorts of tricks, but when she gets into the mind,” Krolia taps a finger to her temple, “she likes to play games. Shiro is your friend, right?”

Pidge nods stupidly - and that’s _not her;_ she’s supposed to know what’s going on, and she’s supposed to know what to do every time someone on her team is on the brink of death. Being out of her depth is an unfamiliar feeling, and it fits her poorly, like a jacket two sizes too small.

“None of that matters. It doesn’t matter whether _he’d_ hurt you or not, because this - this _thing_ is not your friend.”

In the dark, the shadows cast a harsh light on Krolia’s face, warping the lines of the room and disrupting the faint glow of the Altean fixtures. Krolia’s features are strong and symmetrical, beautiful in a way that models strive for in photoshoot, only dark and heavy with some stoic truth.

_Do you understand me?_

“I know.”

“He _will_ kill you.”

“I know.”

 

* * *

 

Pidge tells the team.

Keith doesn’t believe her (she expects that), Lance asks question after question, trying to make sense of it all (she understands that), and Hunk, who has been quiet this entire time, only locks his eyes with hers and sighs, a heavy sigh that communicates so much more than the others realize.

_I understand. I’ve felt it too._

Pidge pulls up her screen and explains in the simplest way that she can, briefly touching on the fact that Krolia had gotten a tip from the Blade and everything she related to Pidge checked out. She opens reports of Haggar’s experiments and relays theories locked away in the deepest recesses of her database, connects them with a string, and lets the pieces fall into place.

It explains the subtle changes in Shiro’s behavior, the inconsistency of his physical appearance when they’d rescued him given to the allotted time, and the uneasy feeling she’d had that rescuing him was _too_ easy. It explains his mounting paranoia, his callous resentment for Lance, the way that this Shiro was rigid and unyielding to change.

Pidge even confides with them the results of her own tests, ones that she’d conducted weeks prior without Shiro’s knowledge. She has a hologram of his brain scan hovering in her palm and is explaining how the variance of brain activity indicates that something or someone shares a space in his prefrontal cortex when Allura concedes, biting her lip so hard it could fall off and clenching her hands with white knuckles.

 

* * *

 

Meeting Kuron for the first time is like taking a wrong turn into a familiar street.  
He looks as though one might imagine he would - tired and red-rimmed around the eyes, as if he’d been bedridden for ages and gone raving mad the entire time.

 

* * *

 

“Shiro, this isn’t you!” Keith calls out, fear fraying at his voice.

Shiro’s eyes widen for a millisecond, and Keith thinks that he can see a reflection of a pupil behind the golden gleam.

_I don’t want to hurt you._

Then the man blinks, and this shining, innocent thing is gone. The gold burns out the whites of his eyes, and his pupils glaze over. Shiro smiles with all of his teeth, glowing and predatory, and Keith’s heart sinks to the pit of his stomach.

The glow of his Galra hand illuminates the planes of his face.

He goes in for the kill.

 

* * *

 

This time, there’s a plan.

There’s a reason Lance hasn’t used his broadsword, why Hunk is in full defense but has no plan to attack, why Allura keeps a good distance despite her range. If Kuron hadn’t been so strategically preoccupied, he might have noticed that he was only facing three paladins at a time.

Pidge takes the shot.

 

* * *

 

 _An old legend lives in the forests of northern Japan._  
_It tells of the_ shiryō _, the lost, vengeful souls of the departed who scour the ashes of the earth and haunt the living._ _  
_ They beckon for death.

 

* * *

 

“It could dangerous,” Lance insists. He makes to grab her arm as she passes, but stops himself just in time. She glares at him over the dish in her arms, and she hopes that he knows that she’s not upset with him, not really. It’s just that it’s something that Matt would’ve tried to do, and the Matt she found never got to meet the Shiro he knew.

“Shiro wouldn’t,” Pidge assures him, glancing behind his shoulder. Keith is seated at the end of the dining table, staring at the countertop. He doesn’t speak.

“It’s not Shiro,” Lance says, as if she needs reminding, and she almost scoffs. Keith does not look up.

“Haggar is gone. There’s nothing left of her. Whoever he is, whatever they made - it’s all him now. Believe me, I checked.”

Pidge knows that Lance will take her at her word, and he trusts her to know (it’s her job to know, unofficially, but she does it anyway and she failed it once. She can’t fail again). Even if he trusts her to know what she’s walking into - a lion’s den, or a conversation with a friend - he won’t be happy about it, and he won’t stop worrying about her. This is what Pidge loves most about Lance, that deep, protective instinct learned over the years from warning his siblings to look both ways before crossing the street and carrying bandaids in his pockets in case of scraped knees.

It’s something Matt used to do before Kerberos, and she misses him very much. “If you get off my ass about it, then I’ll send Hunk down there instead.”

“Why would I want Hunk down there any more than you?” Lance asks suspiciously, before he gets it.

Pidge is, at her heart, a cynical bird, bless her soul. She is curious and desperate to learn, and this quality keeps her alive and well, but when it comes down to it, her mind is a computer - always processing input and output, cross referencing the data she’s collected over time into an algorithm.

She’s a wonderful problem-solver, the best he knows, but she’s not much of a people-solver after all. Hunk can see that Lotor is full of flaws, and therefore full of liabilities. If _he_ can see it, then _Pidge_ has psychoanalyzed it and judged him accordingly.

She never liked Lotor, and will never trust him. The probability just isn’t in his favor.

Hunk, on the other hand, could be the man for the job.

 

* * *

 

“I’m afraid we have a...dilemma,” Allura says, wringing her hands. “In light of Shiro’s absence, we don’t have a Black Paladin, and I hardly think that -” here, she casts a broken look at the doorway, and Lance understands that her gaze goes beyond the hallway and through the walls of the pod where the clone is sedated - “our new guest would not be capable to piloting in his state, if he even wanted to.”

The silence takes on a new meaning.

Lance looks between the two. “What, so no head?”

“And no Voltron,” Allura confirms.

“The arms and legs are fully functional, but a Black Paladin is not,” Coran volunteers helpfully. “Seeing as we have a limited number of candidates, we need to act fast.” Lance sends a helpless look at Keith.

“Keith, maybe you could -?” he tries and trails off at Keith’s uncertain expression. It clashes with sharp angles and a firm jawline; it doesn’t look right on his face. Keith’s gotten better at knowing what he wants, and Lance gets the feeling that he doesn’t want this.

“Maybe,” Keith says, doubtful. “If we have to, then I could -”

“If I may,” Lotor cuts in, and suddenly Keith’s doubt morphs into suspicion. “I believe that - should the Black Lion allow it - if I could try a hand at piloting, I may be allowed in. Temporarily, of course, but due to the time construction -”

“Of course,” Allura says graciously. Keith has had enough, and he opens his mouth to say so, but Lance beats him to it.

 

* * *

 

“Lance, I’m surprised at you,” Allura says later, sounding disappointed to boot. “I would’ve thought that of all of the paladins, you would be most supportive.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to be supportive. It’s not that I don’t trust him.”

“But…?”

“He’s not someone that we would want at the helm.”

Allura looks like she wants to argue with this, but bites her tongue.

“If doesn’t matter if we want him or not,” she admits with a sigh, “but a team needs a leader. We need a Black Lion regardless of who’s behind the controls. It’s the only way for us to protect the universe.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I have to.”

 

* * *

 

“She told me you’d try to kill us, you know,” Hunk says conversationally, one cheek bulging with pie.

It’s orange meringue, or it's pretending to be, at least. Hunk hasn’t found real oranges in space, but he has found a passable substitute, and that combined with the genuine dairy they have on the ship makes the desert lighter than he would’ve thought and taste strongly of citrus fruit.

Kuron doesn’t respond. He stares straight ahead, hollow in the eyes. He’s grateful for that, just a little. Hunk doesn’t know what he’d do if he responded and he gauged the reaction; he could be too little like Shiro, which worries him.

“Krolia,” Hunk confirms, “Keith’s mother. The Blade got a lucky tip, just in time,” in case he hasn’t connected the dots by now, which he doubts. He has Shiro’s memories, just not his conscience. “I didn’t believe her at first, you know. I think that I...I knew she was right, but I didn’t want to believe it. I suspected, for a while, that something was off. You didn’t feel right, even when everything else did.”

He stuffs the last bit of pie into his mouth, tucks a spare crumb from the corner of his lip.

Kuron doesn’t move.

“I was right, about one thing, though, wasn’t I?”

Kuron’s motionless, but the shadows around his eyes have receded, and he looks a little more like himself than he did.

“You didn’t want to kill us, did you? Not really.”

He stares at Kuron’s shoulders, which are broad and drooping, and realizes that the trauma of the Champion rests in his head. This Shiro is still tormented by what he’s done, what his predecessor lived through, and he has a right to this trauma. Hunched in a cell, listening to the musings of a boy behind a glass wall - does he feel like a prisoner again?

Hunk is staring at his back and wondering whether or not he should leave when he finally turns around and looks at him, really looks at him, and gives him a scare.

“Of _course_ I didn’t,” he says, sounding gentle and soft and hurt, and above all, very much like the Shiro he remembers, and he settles back on his stool. It’s as he suspected.

“Alright, then,” Hunk concedes, satisfied. The wall between them flickers and disappears into the air as if it had never been there at all, and the space between remains translucent as it was.

Kuron stays where he is and makes no move to leave, but his eyes widen.

Hunk hops off the bar stool, crouches down, and picks up the spare plate stashed between the legs. “Pie?”

 

* * *

 

He’s twelve years old and the hems of his jeans are shredded to hell.

It’s not too bad; Keith’s had these jeans since before Takashi took him in officially, and they were already caked with mud and grime and whatever it was that a twelve-year-old boy would get himself into. It’s good for growing boys to get plenty of exercise, and he hopes that Takashi understands this. He must, with all the vegetables he’s been trying to shove down his throat.

As it turns out, Takashi does not understand, nor does he sympathize.

“Keith, you have to learn how to control yourself, or else you’re going to end up at - I don’t know, McDonald’s, or something.”

“You mean, we’re going to McDonald’s if I can’t control myself?”

“Keith. No.”

Takashi pinches the bridge of his nose, looking quite like he doesn’t know what to do or say that doesn’t make him a shitty guardian. Keith sends him a look that he hopes communicates how wholly unimpressed he is.

“I know that it’s not your fault,” he placates (that’s only partially correct, and he knows it), “but you can’t keep getting into fights. It’s not worth it.”

Somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, Shiro must have forgotten, but children are _mean (_ Keith does not have a mother and has never had one as far as he’s concerned, but the idea is ingrained in his skull, and the absence of it hurts like hell). They pick at his blind spots like they would scabs, carelessly and relentlessly with no regard for what lies beneath.

He can’t exactly blame Takeshi for forgetting. After all, who wants to remember a thing like that?

Keith tries not to consider himself a violent child, but that’s what he is, with a history of mild misdemeanors and a habit of lashing out irrationally. It’s fueled by his crippling abandonment issues, or so he’s been told. That, or Keith is just a wild, frightened thing.

He responds by baring his teeth, pulling his lips back into a snarl.

 

* * *

 

Maybe Shiro hadn’t forgotten after all, because he only looked at Keith thoughtfully after that.

Later, he bought him a new pair of pants.

 

* * *

 

Keith heads down to talk to Kuron for the first time in a week.

 

* * *

 

“Shiro?”

Kuron almost snorts. “Do I look like -”

Keith crowds into the corner where Kuron’s huddled, sliding down against the wall and landing shoulder-to-shoulder with him. He elbows him in the side, hard, to make more room.

“Move your ass.”

Kuron moves his ass.

A beat passes.

“You don’t have to stay here. You’re free to -” Keith gestures lamely around the room - “you know, walk around, I guess. Meander.” _Nice work, Samurai,_ he thinks, and winces. “I mean, you don’t have to stay in this room. You’re not a prisoner.”

“Why aren’t I, Keith? I almost - I tried to - I tried to _kill you_ ,” he chokes out.

“My brother pushed me around a bit, so what?” Keith rolls his eyes. “I’m not setting up a kickstarter to put you down.”

“The benefit of killing me would be that there’s no chance of _me_ trying to kill any of _you_. You don’t know what I could do. _I_ don’t know what I could do.” Kuron stares at his bare hands, one flesh and bone, one strapped in leather. They both feel unremarkable to him, drained and unusable, but the terror of the yellow haze slipping over his vision keeps him upright.

“We know what Haggar can do. We know what you can do. We know what you _wouldn’t_ do, okay? That wasn’t you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. Pidge said so, and she’s a genius.”

Kuron misses the old Keith, the _first_ Keith who met the entrance of the Garrison with a scowl, who had by then possessed an unnerving self-awareness and flaunted it like a badge. Of course, _this_ Keith, the new Keith, is much the same in those regards, but he still misses the old, younger brother he had - he might be the only one left who remembers him.

Kuron lets out a dry chuckle. “Obviously.”

On the other hand, Keith may be the only one left who remembers _Shiro._

 

* * *

 

Lance tells Keith not to worry about Lotor.

They’re cuddling (Lance is thrilled, he’s never been this close to Keith unless it’s sparring or one of them is on the brink of death), and Lance’s heart is about to explode. He’s never asked Keith about the exact nature of their relationship - he just hasn’t found the time, he supposes, and Keith had made his feelings pretty clear when, in the middle of an argument, he’d slammed him into a wall and spat out that he loved him.

Keith _loved_ him. Lance could hardly believe it at the time, and he can hardly believe it now, even when Keith is comfortably settled between his legs as though close contact without violence is something they do all the time.

It’s not.

Keith and Lance are cuddling, for lack of a better term, and in love. A clone of Shiro is locked in one of the holding cells below, and Pidge is dead set on finding the real Shiro, the first Shiro. The team is right behind her. Krolia has departed for the time being, back to espionage and ninja work and whatever it is that she does with the Blades, and Lotor is an unofficial branch of Voltron, a scorned hand of the Galra empire.

“While I was gone, you two were - friends, right? Hunk mentioned that you sparred together. A lot. Did you ever - ?” Keith asks him, on edge. The uneven pace of his breath contrasts with the way his joints are relaxed, molded against Lance’s.

He sets his chin over Keith’s shoulder, sneaks a peek at the narrow ride of his nose, brushes against his jaw with his own, and thinks about it.

Lotor is, above all else, a proud creature, and wounded beyond belief at rejection. He feels as though there have been doors shut to him all his life - what with Zarkon being too busy with enslaving the universe to be anything better than an absentee father. The lack of family is something that Lance feels in space, like a fresh wound. Lance understands, feels for his plight, and, after some hesitation, opens the gate.

Lance isn’t sure, even now, what Lotor had been asking him for when he all but propositioned him. Before Keith came back from his stint with the Blades, when it seemed like Keith was gone for good and had become a memory that stayed with him regardless of the distance, Lotor was interesting and interested.

If there was no Keith, if there never was (impossible, Lance thinks, there is no conceivable reality where Keith Kogane and his dumb mullet don’t exist), then perhaps he could’ve stopped chasing after a burning sun, and reached for a new mythology.

Lance doesn’t know how to answer, so he answers honestly.

“I don’t know.”

 

* * *

 

“Allura, I’ve been thinking. I’m an emperor…”

“Yes?”

“And you’re a princess…”

“Yes...?”

“So, clearly, I’m superior.”

“What the quiznack -” Allura resists the urge to rip her crown off and beat some sense into his face. “This is about the Black Lion again, isn’t it?”

“Well, maybe, but -”

“It already chose, Lotor! It chose me!”

“Does that mean that there’s another opening?”

 _Like hell there is,_  Keith thinks from the doorway, and tears off towards the hangars.

 

* * *

 

“How did you get so good at this?” Lance is a warm presence at his side, almost enough to override the thrill of Blue’s voice ringing through his mind with perfect clarity. “First Red, then Black, and now -” Lance stops himself for a moment and laughs. “That’s the last thing I expected. It figures, though. The Garrison prodigy _would_ get at least half of the Lions.”

Keith grins back at him, unabashed. “You’re not doing too bad, yourself. Besides, Black was an emergency." _Pr_ _odigy, my ass,_  he thinks, and sobers. “I wouldn’t have made it at the Garrison if it weren’t for Shiro,” he says seriously, and Lance raises an eyebrow, torn between curiosity and disbelief.

“Keith Kogane, the ‘best pilot the Garrison’s seen in years -'”

“Not if I got kicked out for insurrection first.” Keith’s grin is broad, but he barely feels it. “Shiro told me that if I couldn’t at least get my grades up, he wouldn’t let me get my tetanus shot.”

Lance squints. “That’s - weird? What did you -?”

Keith shrugs. “I studied, I guess.”

 

* * *

 

"Keith, didn't your files say that you were lactose intolerant?"  
Keith looks up from shoveling ice cream into his mouth at record speed, and shrugs. "It's a Christmas miracle."  
"It's August."  
"Whoops."  
He takes a swig of milk, then stuffs another spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. Shiro almost gags.  
"Keith, you _better_ stop, right now." Keith takes a swig of milk, and Shiro lunges across the table, tugging the carton from his hands. " _STOP_. Are you serious? You could get seriously sick!"  
"We all die. You either kill yourself, or get killed." He makes a move to take the bowl too, but Keith's bulging cheeks and vicious glare stops him in his tracks. He keeps his distance.  
Shiro cannot believe it. This bullshit is happening to him in his own goddamn house. Keith freezes for a second and pulls a face, putting one hand over his stomach and muttering something that sounds suspiciously like " _mothertrucker_ ".  
" _What the fuck is he saying?"_  Shiro mouths at Adam in desperation, who only shrugs. Keith sneers and takes up his spoon again.  
"Yeah, and what are you gonna do about it? The Garrison is actual hell. I can kill myself if I want."  
"Goddamn," Adam whistles from the corner, looking impressed. "This kid has the same sense of humor I do."  
_"Adam!"_  Shirt snaps, craning his neck to glare at him. "You're not helping."  
"I'll be fine. I'm not actually gonna die," Keith rolls his eyes, hard. "Y'all'd've thought that you'd be familiar with children and their needs before picking a random one to adopt." He narrows his eyes over the counter at Shiro. "Hick."  
_"Do not hit a child, do not hit a child."_

 

* * *

  

“I don’t think this is over. Neither does Krolia.”

“We don’t even know if he knew, and if he did, then why didn’t he tell us?”

Pidge takes off her glasses, wipes the lenses, and sets them down carefully. She doesn’t need them. “That’s what _I’d_ like to know.”

“Why can’t we just give him the benefit of the doubt? Everyone should have that chance.” Her expression remains impassive, but Hunk doesn’t miss the way that her fingers briefly clench and flex before relaxing.

“Except Lotor. He's a real bitch.”

“Right…” Hunk’s gaze slides across the room to where Allura’s laugh echoes like a wind chime, and Lotor looks far too pleased with himself. Pidge narrows her eyes.

“It’s time to cash in another hunch.”

 

* * *

 

Lance remembers Samuel Holt leaving to return to Earth, and Pidge refusing to go back with him. For one brief, unforgivable moment, Lance hated her.

It clears up at once, and of course he’s horrified at himself, but he can’t stop himself for being horrified at Pidge, too, just a little.

“We’re in space. We’re in space, and I get one phone call.” Lance’s voice is even, which almost distracts Keith from the way his hands are shaking. It’s not a phone call, and his team is not his jailer, but Lance has his brief, unforgivable moments, and he forgets himself.

“Yeah?”

“I get one phone call, right? And I’m thinking about what I want to tell them, I’m thinking that I need to make it _count_ because - because - we could _die_ up here, Keith. We could die, but would it really - would it really matter?”

 Of course it would matter, Keith says. If you die, you’re going to leave a Lance-shaped hole in space, and maybe a Lance-shaped absence in me.

“You’re not gonna die, Lance,” he says instead, and that could be a lie, but it’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than the reality that Lance is hauling around.

Lance snorts. “Aliens,” he scoffs good-naturedly. “Who’s going to believe us? I mean, the Garrison will kind of have to, once we give them undeniable proof of alien life, but beyond that?”

Keith raises an eyebrow. “I thought I was the one with all of the government conspiracies?” Lance’s eyes look off into the distance, thoughtful.

“Nah. The government gets up to a lot of shit.” He glances over at Keith. “The Garrison probably covered up our disappearances, just like they did with Shiro and Matt, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Holt let us record messages to our families, and I didn’t - didn’t say everything. You know, about the aliens, or the lions, any of that. I didn’t say everything about the war. Maybe I should have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t want them to worry.” Lance says it like it’s obvious. “Maybe it’s better if they don’t know everything, not yet.”

As if death would be a mercy, Keith realizes. Months ago, he might have conceded, might have stoked the flames of ignorant bliss and agreed that a grieving family was better off not knowing. There are tens of thousands of ways to die in space. Keith hasn’t counted them all, hasn’t even thought of half of them, but the possibilities come to mind quickly enough.

Death by pressurization. Death by asphyxiation. Death by toxic atmosphere. Death by crash landing. Death by fire.

Lance could’ve died any of those ways, and could still.

He imagines Veronica’s inevitable anger, anger at the Garrison, at aliens, at whatever must’ve taken her brother. He thinks of Pidge going wild with hope, clinging to the thinnest of threads. He thinks of Shiro, trapped in a gladiator ring fighting to the death while Adam and Keith and everything else he’d ever known, was far, far, out of reach.

Keith remembers the wooden shack and the imprint of a mother gone, and shudders.

“They have a right to know, though, don’t they? Sometimes, the thing you need most is closure, because _not knowing_ is worse than - I don’t know, the grief.”

Sometimes it’s the void that gets to you first.

 

* * *

 

“I know about the Alteans, Lotor.”

He pauses and tilts his head to the side, very careful.

“I'm afraid I don't quite know what you mean, dear.”

“The Blade. I've done my research. I'm really not as naive as you think I am.” Allura smiles, hard and sharp and cold, and from the distant look on his face, he knows the game is up.

“Allura, it’s not what you think.”

“I won’t hesitate, Lotor.” Allura levels her bayard at him, all pride and royal expertise, and Lotor thinks that he’s never hated or admired her so much.

He tries again, desperate. “Think of it, the potential that they could help us reach, Allura.”

“They’re my _people._ They’re Altea!” 

“They’re progress. That’s how we survive, my dear, that’s how we evolve. It’s unorthodox, and it’s unconventional, but so is nature, and sometimes you need complete control over the unpredictable if you want to stand a chance.” 

The paladins are frozen in place, mere spectators. Hunk is shaking next to her, seemingly unable to process what’s unfolding, and Pidge nearly reaches for his hand.

“They’re not puppets, they’re _people._ ”

“People who are still alive, thanks to me!”

“Alive with no agency, Lotor. You really did do them a favor all these years, didn’t you?”

“What use is agency in the face of survival?” he hisses. “There are hundreds of vessels, who believe they have the freedom of choice, and when it comes down to us or them -”

 _“You knew,”_ she says in a whisper, “you knew all along.” Then, just as murderous, “You _knew_ what Haggar did, and you didn’t tell us!”

He nods. His face is a mask of calm, and he makes no move to retreat or attack, but his eyes soften in a way that Pidge has come to know is artificial, in the way that he manufactures sarcasm and promotes diplomatic procedure. Her own hands creep to her bayard, and his gaze flickers to the movement.

He pins Pidge with his eyes. His mouth is a straight, hard line, and something seems to hold her in place, keeps her breath in her lungs and glues her feet to the floor.

 _Unless you find a way to keep me here,_ his silent stare tells her, _I’ll kill you. I will be your enemy, and I will be a dangerous one._

That's right, she thinks. A Lotor on his own is a frightful, lonely thing, and the loneliest are the scariest, she's come to find.

She thinks of Kuron, his eyes wide and yellow, lashing out at her in the dark.

 

* * *

 

She thinks of the Shiro she ran into on the stairs in the dark mere minutes after she found out, the way she imagined his eyes flickering golden in a heartbeat and searing holes into his own skull.

 _“Shiro,”_ she had said slowly, _“no one else is going to leave, you know.”_ Pidge had placed a tiny hand on his shoulder, trying to broadcast comfort without divulging the way her heart beat against her ribcage, rapid and light with fear. _“I promise.”_

At the time, he didn’t seem to know what she was talking about, and only looked down at her with an expression of bemusement and unadulterated affection that she could read easily, even in the dark. Indeed, even she wasn’t sure what exactly it was she was promising, and if she was addressing him or something else.

_Everything will be okay._

Perhaps not. Pidge specializes in numbers, not belief, and the odds didn’t say anything about that.

_We’ll still love you, even when your flesh is stripped away and we find what lies underneath._

Inevitably, they’ll find someone lurking behind his retina and residing in his eye sockets, wormed into his mind like a virus. She desperately wants to believe that Krolia is wrong, that her intel is skewed and riddled with technical errors, but she can’t, because it’s adding up too fast and too well to be a coincidence. Pidge doesn’t believe in coincidences, anyway.

_You’re still Shiro, in a way._

His exterior is breaking away piece-by-piece, revealing the second skin underneath, and it’s as if his arm extends further than they thought it did, wedged between muscle and bone and taking root within his chest. It’s as though he was half-mechanical after all, and it’s only now that his exposed parts are oxidizing. He raises his voice more quickly, and he is reaching the end of his own rope, which is growing more knotted and frayed as he goes, but he’s made of the same, insoluble stuff that the Shiro-from-before was made of.

_You’re still family._

She remembers the Kerberos mission, and how she trusted the lives of her father and brother in the hands of a face she’d only seen on a screen, and a name that she’d heard Matt praise and stretch thin on a daily basis, until he left for space and she didn’t hear from him again, not for a while.

She remembers _Katie_ (wrapped up in lilac bows and a dauntless curiosity that her father said would carry her to the ends of the earth, and oh, how she misses that girl) and how she was prepared to lose her in the process of saving her brother and then the world, and how Takashi Shirogane clung to the name and the face without her realizing it and pulled it from the wreckage.

 _“Goodnight, Pidge,”_ Shiro had said after a moment while the stars blinked in and out of existence behind him. She gave him a short nod that he couldn’t have seen, resisting the odd urge to throw him a salute.

_“G’night, Shiro.”_

 

* * *

 

Lotor’s been on the ship for how long now? Two weeks? Three? She’s lost count, which is devastatingly easy to do in space, and in that undetermined period, he has grown familiar. Greasy and invasive, sure, but constantly flitting in and out of her peripheral to the point where she isn’t particularly surprised by him anymore (Pidge is proud of herself for that).

He’ll never be kind, and he’ll always be a little more cunning than she is (and that throws her off) and perhaps in time he could come to be good company. He has Hunk’s blessing, and that counts for more than one would think, because although he is universally kind and empathetic he’s also distrustful when he needs to be, and if he’s willing to tolerate Prince Loquat despite the fact that he doesn’t like him, then he must see something that she doesn’t.

But. But.  
She doesn't trust him, still. God, she doesn't trust him as far as she could throw him, given the chance.

Shiro is the one who remembers her for what she was and what she is. She’s not Keith and will never be Keith, will probably never have the sacred, familial bond that Shiro and Keith developed over time and that’s okay, but he does mean something to her and the knowledge that this is not the _real_ Shiro, the _first_ Shiro, and she’s only just realized, hurts. It hurts a lot, but from where Pidge is standing, it looks as though it doesn’t hurt Lotor at all.

 

* * *

 

“Princess,” he begins, holding his hands up in a way that could be interpreted as subservient, but he’s not pleading, not yet. “I assure you, I meant no harm in withholding such information, and while it was - regretful -” here he stumbles over the word like a roadblock - “I was uncertain of the consequences of acting on unconfirmed suspicions.”

Allura’s hands don’t waver now, not for a second, but her face is an open portrait of conflicting emotions, and most prominently, _fear._

Lotor’s voice is gentle and placating, something Pidge is sure that he’s worked very hard on in the past, and she suddenly remembers that horses can smell fear. It’s ridiculous, of course, because it’s just an idiom, and horses can’t smell fear so much as they pick up on other sensations to pinpoint discomfort, but the impression that he’s measuring her friend’s reactions and tailoring his own to them makes her blood boil.

This is how Keith feel all the time, nearly jumping out of his skin and waiting for a fight.

Lotor’s hand twitches again, imperceptibly, and her own instincts kick in.

“ALLURA, MOVE!” someone barks, and it’s only when she tackles Allura with the full brunt that her tiny body can provide that she realizes that that someone is her.

Allura collides with the floor, hard but not painful, and Pidge gets a split-second of relief before Lotor’s hand makes contact with her neck, and suddenly she can’t breath.

 

* * *

 

He scans the room, but he can’t help the fact that his eyes keep flickering over to the corner where Lance clutches his bayard with tight knuckles.

Perhaps, Lotor thinks, if he looks closely, his hands are shaking. He really does have an unshakable faith, he muses, and draws his own sword, presses the tip against the joint between the girl’s neck and shoulder.

Keith makes a move, ready to maul him, and Lotor applies pressure. He freezes.

Lance looks on with all the horror and wonder of a child who has witnessed the unthinkable. If he tightened his grip, he could crush her windpipe, he’s sure of it.

The Green Paladin kicks and squirms like a mewling kitten, her tiny hands clawing at his grip, gasping for air.

“Let her go, Lotor,” Lance growls. His bayard elongates, and he props his rifle up against his shoulder and takes aim from the foreground, ready to take a shot.

Lotor’s eyes widen a fraction, because he was expecting a sword - he’s only ever fought against Lance’s broadsword, but he realizes with a pang that there may have been a reason for that.

 

* * *

 

 _I was wrong I was wrong I was wrong I was wrong,_ Lance screams to himself. He doesn’t take his eyes off the target, but his heart hammers against his chest in a frantic rhythm, and his vision tunnels with panic.

Pidge is too small, too young, too _little._ She’s fighting for her life while they stand and _watch_ but if Keith makes a move like he’s bound to do or Hunk barrels forward like he wants to do then Lance may never get that shot in, or Lotor could just take her neck off with his blade instead.

The moment lasts for less than a second, but it’s enough time for Allura to leap up from behind the pair, yank him backwards by his long, white hair, and get him over her shoulder, slamming him to the ground with a _crash._

 

* * *

 

Kuron’s old cell has been empty for a few days, at the most. It’s a new record.

 

* * *

 

Pidge’s room is a mess of clothes, odd gadgets, spare parts, and the occasional potted plant that Lance is certain must be fake and purely for aesthetic purposes, because Pidge is one of the least nurturing people he knows, and he knows for a fact that she couldn’t keep an aloe vera alive for more than a week before giving up completely.

On one hand, he doesn’t mind venturing into Pidge’s room every once in a while; her chaos is organized and swept into a vague nest shape that feels homey and lived-in in a way that reminds him of Earth.

On the other hand, the floor of her room is set up like an unintentional minefield in the dark, and one runs the risk of stepping on an allegorical LEGO with any slight movement. Lance is willing to take that risk, however, because the glowing lid of her computer in the dark shines like a beacon of hope, illuminating her sleeping figure. He doesn’t want to wake her, not really. She doesn’t get nearly enough sleep as it is, and he’s intent on turning back around and leaving her be.

That plan is immediately foiled when his bare foot presses down on something small, metallic, and sharp, and he lets out a blood curdling _shriek_ that sends Pidge jolting awake with a muffled swear and him careening over in the dark and into unseen objects with a noisy crash.

 

* * *

 

Pidge calls him ‘Sisy’ immediately after being cajoled from sleep to cover her shift for what the paladins like to refer to as “rehabilitation time,” although it can be more accurately referred to as “monitor Lotor to make sure that he doesn’t (a) break out of his confines, which is unlikely, or (b) try to bite his own tongue off in a fit of lunacy, which less likely by a small margin.

Correction: Pidge calls him ‘Sisy’ _moments_ after being roused from what must’ve been a particularly uneventful dream, or some variation of one, because her words are slow and unfocused (generally unlike Pidge in general) and she has to squint to keep track of them (also very uncharacteristic of Pidge’s general character, although Lance couldn’t blame her. Insomnia was a bitch).

What she actually does first is tell Lance to fuck off, impressively articulate for someone half-asleep, and then mumble faint insults into her pillowcase before he takes her by the shoulders and hauls her up.  
Lance thinks, at first, that she means ‘sissy’ - and for some reason, it doesn't bother him all that much, coming from her. But, she explains as she yawns and stretches like a cat, she's not insulting his dignity or masculinity, at least not this time.

She's referring to _Sisyphus_ , the old Greek king sentenced to rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to fall back down the hill right before he reached the top.  
Lance wonders why she'd resort to such an obscure reference before remembering that she’s an intellectual freak who spends way too much time on Wikipedia for someone of her caliber, and perhaps these sorts of things just occur naturally to people like her. Then he wonders aloud why this applies to him, and she responds with a tired laugh.  
"Because you're just trying too hard for him, Lance," she tells him, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "And we’re all doing our best, but it's just an endless cycle, isn't it?"  
Pidge’s tone is colloquial, and she sets off to go supervise their half-conscious guest for the next few hours before Allura takes over halfheartedly trying to coax him back to sanity.

He watches her go, thinking about boulders and rolling hills.

 

* * *

 

Lotor’s hair hasn’t been properly hydrated and conditioned for nearly a week. It's not properly disheveled, somehow, despite the fact that he isn’t allowed even a comb within his cell, but he’s braided it back into a plait that trails over his shoulder. His eyes are shuttered closed and he’s propped up against the wall, looking utterly at peace and unapologetically dead to the world.

Pidge peers closer through the glass, hoping to catch the telltale rise and fall of his chest. She raps her knuckles against the glass.

“Oh, no. Did you die? Are you dead?”

One can only hope.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I only fell asleep, waiting on you to fetch me a sandwich.” Lotor props one eye open and flicks his gaze at her, lazy. “Maybe some water?”

She huffs.

“Go back to sleep, and starve.”

“Can I _please_ have some water?”

“Sure, in -” Pidge checks the time - “three hours. Timed for optimal health in containment.”

“That's no way to treat a guest.”

“Hostage.”

“You're no fun.”

“You're a douchebag,” she scoffs. “Get a life.”

“I've lived for thousands of years. You - you're a child. What could you possibly know about life?” Lotor scoffs.

“I know that ‘saving’ the remains of a population that your father destroyed just to experiment on them like _lab rats_ is pretty disrespectful,” she narrows her eyes, and he rolls his shoulders, stretches like a cat in the sun.

“And here _I_ thought that you of all people might understand.”

“What?”

“What have you done in the name of science? Have you never thought how far you would go, how much can be achieved in the name of the greater good? For the sake of exploration?”

He’s trying to mess with you, catch you off guard, Pidge tells herself. There’s not much else he can do in a glass cage. There’s not much else anyone would do.

“I believe in science. _Not_ bullshit.”

“Have I ever lied to your team?”

_Is he kidding?_

Pidge thinks of Allura’s expression, a blank slate of horror, a perfect Marion Crane. She thinks of the slump of Lance’s shoulders, the silence that trails after him these days.

Hunk, disappointed.

Shiro, gone.

“Really?”

“ _Directly?"_  Lotor leans forward like he’s cornered a mouse, eager. “Our friends never -”

“We’re not your friends.” _Not anymore."_ Shehopes it hurts, hopes it comes off as more dismissive than it is. Allura may not have it in her, and Lance is too good to take advantage of the opportunity, but Pidge _wants_ to see him flinch, wants to see if there’s anything in him that may have been real after all. She just wants to know.

He purses his lips.

“What are a few lives compared to an entire civilization?”

“They were worth more than yours,” she gnashes out between clenched teeth, “and they’ll last longer than you, too. They already have.” Allura’s people still exist, are still willing to exist. She’s not alone in the universe, but Lotor is, he’s seen to that, and if he rots away in a glass cage in the bottom of a castle then -

The thought goes unfinished, but he seems to complete it for her, his careful expression unhinging, revealing the venom beneath.

“You’ll die slowly, stupidly -”

“I’m done with this conversation.”

Pidge spins on her heel and trudges towards the stairs, not caring if Lance gets on her ass about abandoning her shift. It’s late anyway, and he had interrupted the first decent few hours of sleep she’d gotten in for a while.

 

* * *

 

Lance understands completely, because of course he does.

He makes a huge deal about it, whining and complaining about her lack of commitment like a drama kid vying for extra credit, because _of course he does._

What actually surprises her is that Allura, who is miraculously awake at this hour, volunteers to go with him.

 

* * *

 

“He told me, once, that I was his only friend on the ship.”

Lance says it quietly, in a small breath that Allura probably wouldn’t have heard if she wasn’t listening closely and the room hadn’t been silent enough to hear a pin drop. Her eyes flicker up at him, filled and shining to the brim, threatening to overflow.

“He...he said that?” she asks, and when she says it, her voice is strong and unwavering, but carefully inquisitive.

“Yeah,” Lance scratches the back of his neck and chuckles, but it lacks warmth or feeling. “He said he had you, too, and I didn’t really think much of it, only that he must be pretty lonely.” He sighs. “He reminded me of someone, and I guess - I don’t know. I thought that I could see a future with Voltron, and he’d be there too.”

 _I guess I was wrong,_ is what he doesn’t say, because then he’d have to amend it to _I guess_ we _were wrong_ , but that sounds too much like _I guess_ you _were wrong_ , and there’s no way in hell he's pinning the blame on Allura like that.

Allura’s gaze pans across the room from where they’re sitting. Lotor’s frame is slumped against the glass, partially propped up by the wall.

His legs are crossed at the ankle and stretched out in an almost leisurely manner, as if he’s relaxing for only a moment, and not bound and imprisoned in the belly of a castle that once trusted him.

He looks even taller than he is somehow, strewn across the ground and unmoving. Lotor’s not being starved - they haven’t crossed the line to sadistic - but he does look thinner. His cheeks are hollowed to the point where his smile (always wide and always terrifying) stretches taught, like canvas on a frame, and Lance suspects that underneath the remains of his armor (they haven’t removed all of it, not yet, and are weary to get close enough to try) his body is unused and lightweight enough for Pidge to sling over her shoulder and drag to Earth herself.

“He told me that what he was doing - the atrocities he committed - was his attempt to preserve my history and launch our civilization into the future.”

Lotor’s head lolls against the glass, barely noticeable, but his eye twitches ever so slightly. He’s an expert at feigning sleep, Lance has come to know, and Allura seems to know this too, because her eyes narrow at his peaceful expression.

“We’re still here, Lance,” she says, and now her voice isn’t just strong, it’s hard and full of steel. “Voltron is still here, in the _now_ , and Prince Lotor -” she stands, and for a moment, Lance can only watch her rise like a skyscraper, proud and royal and larger than life. She closes her eyes and inhales, and to Lance she looks as though she’s breathing in life for the first time. “That’s all in the past,” Allura confesses, opening her eyes to him.

Coming from her lips, it sounds like gospel.

 

* * *

 

He leaves her like that, a glowing, silver outline in the dark, and heads off to bed.

 

* * *

 

“Tell me a story,” Marco begs him one night, propped up against a stack of pillows so large that it threatens to engulf him. Marco's fighting drowsiness, and it is only sheer boredom that keeps him awake, despite the healthy dose of Tylenol he’d taken only a few hours prior and the cold that keeps him sleepy and subdued.

Lance is no writer by any means, but for Marco, there’s little in the world that he wouldn’t do, so he leans back against the opposite headboard and turns the tissue box over in his hands.  
“Once upon a time, there was a bird, a giant, a knight, and a princess, all aboard a train bound for the horizon,” Lance begins, his gaze pinned on the fluorescent stars pasted on the ceiling above him.  
“Not a train,” Marco insists. “Make it a boat.”  
“A boat then - a ship,” Lance amends, “that carried a bird, a giant, and a knight, and was bound for the horizon.”  
“You forgot the princess,” Marco reminds him helpfully, and Lance nods.  
“Right. A princess was there too,” he concedes. “The bird, the giant, the knight, and the princess were good friends. The best of friends, actually. They loved and trusted one another, and would have no one else accompany them on their quest. None of them truly knew what lay waiting for them in the water, but the ship was the only way across the ocean.”  
“Why did they need to cross the ocean?” asks Marco, who has seen and felt and wept in the ocean nearly every summer since he was born, and cannot for the life of him imagine there being an end to it.  
“There’s always an ocean, and this one stretched all the way around the world.” Lance explains, indicating the distance with his hands. “They needed to sail as long and far as they could from where they started, and that meant braving storms, sea monsters, mermaids, and pirates. Things like that. It meant an adventure.”  
Marco nods and accepts it, his eyelids growing heavier. “How long did it take them to get there?”  
Lance is quiet, considering. “A very long time,” he says decidedly, after a moment. Marco laughs, and then yawns and burrows deeper underneath the sheets until the top of the worn, teal quilt covers his mouth and pokes at the tip of his nose. His eyes are closed, and his breathing (loud and congested as it is) is heavy and slow. Lance is just about to take the empty bowl of soup by his bedside table and switch off the lamplight when he hears his voice again, small, faint, and almost asleep,  
“Why didn’t they just turn around and go the other way? Then they would’ve gotten there a lot faster.”  
Lance opens his mouth, closes it. He didn’t think that far ahead, did he? No, but luckily, Marco has already drifted off to sleep, and Lance won’t have to come up with an answer on the spot. Marco won’t even remember it in the morning.  
Lance picks up the discarded bowl and extinguishes the light.

 

* * *

 

At this point in time, Lance has not yet applied for the Garrison. He hasn’t taken up two separate jobs that crowd his weekends, and crammed tutoring into the hours after school on the weekdays because even he knows that he needs to stand out - he needs to excel - and if he does that, he’s going to have to get better grades than he’s got, and to do that, he’s gonna need the money.

He would never want his mother to worry about it, and his father already has enough on his plate, so this is something that Lance is going to have to do himself. It’s a dream he keeps to himself, which is rare, because there aren’t a lot of things tucked close to his heart that he hasn’t screamed or laughed or cried about to friends, family, anyone who will listen and then some. He’s not sure if that makes it more or less real than any other tangible thing he’s pined away for.

At this this point in time, Lance McClain is firmly tethered to Earth, but that will change. He will neither see nor feel the turning point, or identify it, if there ever was one. The McClains are sailors in their own right. They belong to the sea and the land that borders it, because the waters there are tethered to the earth and have built a home in its roots.

The ocean runs through his veins, but at this point in time he has already made up his mind; he’s not going to be a sailor.  
He’s going to be a pilot.

 

* * *

 

_“Shiro, is this where you’ve been the entire time?”_

_The man smiles, terribly beautiful and terribly sad, and holds up his hand, palm facing outwards, as if he means to press it up against glass, towards Keith._

_All around them, the universe begins to crack and fracture, splintering off into fractals of violet light._

“Shiro, no!”

Keith jolts awake, eyes wide.

He looks over at Lance, sprawled out over the pillows next to him, and focuses on slowing his breathing, ignoring the tight feeling in his chest. He slides back down under the covers, closes his eyes, and forgets.

 

* * *

 

“Odd table arrangements, Hunk.” Pidge said, brows raised over her glasses frames at the odd assortment of foreign fruit. It’s unfamiliar to her, but, as it’s lacking visible spikes or blinking, beady eyes, it looks safe enough.

“Welcome to my kitchen,” Hunk says proudly. “I now have bananas and avocados.”

He hands her a purple fruit that’s about the right size and shape, but smells suspicious and has a single, leafy stem. Pidge hefts it in one hand, skeptical.

“Oh, wow, it’s...it’s an avocado? Um, thanks?” She frowns. “No offense, but what the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

“You said you wanted guacamole, right? And I know that Lance said something the other day about missing actual fruit, so I went out and found near-perfect substitutes. Now all that’s left is unraveling the chemistry of each and making sure that I don’t accidentally kill either of you, in case one of them has some sort of dormant toxin.”

“Hunk,” she says slowly, “that’s brilliant.”

“Killing one of you with guacamole?”

“Well, no, I meant reducing each fruit down to its basic form and the lengths you’re willing to go to in xenobiology in the name of culinary fun, but yes, that would be a brilliant murder.”

“Aw, thank you.” He practically glows under the praise, and she shares a brief, private grin with him.

“Yeah, maybe I should handle the engineering, too, and you can do this full time.”

“I think I know more about engineering than you do, genius.”

“If you say so,” she yawns, although she knows he’s right. As he turns back to his new ingredients, Pidge examines the strange fruit in her hand.

Maybe Lance isn’t the only homesick one.

 

* * *

 

“We have a mango tree in our yard - I mean, it’s more of an open field behind our house, but it’s ours.”

The tree had been there long before Lance had been born, had been tipped and buried and cared for, and had lain down its roots.

It was just the one, but it was healthy and steadfast, with an abundance of offshoots blossoming from its thin trunk, and green, glossy leaves crowning treasures in that came in bunches. Lance remembers the lower branches positively dripping with fruit, large and blushing, the color of oxblood. The flesh was pale yellow, and when he bit into it, the smell was cloying and sweet.

He closes his eyes, and just for a second he feels the prickle of grass on the bare backs of his legs, the shade that the canopy provides from thousand-yard-heat, and the smell of earth and sun.

“You gardened?” Keith asks, sounding surprised. Lance laughs.

“Hardly. The rest of us just happened to spend a lot of time outside, so I guess we just wanted something to do.” Lance remembers his swing set, tethered to old, warm wood, and a clear blue sky. He blinks back to the present, looks out the window, past the glass and beyond the layers of space smothering it, and sighs. It’s almost inaudible. “Mamá is the gardener in the family. She spent just as much time outside as we did, when she wasn’t in the kitchen.”

“Mm. Vegetables?”

“Nah, flowers, mostly.” He risks a glance at Keith.

 

* * *

 

Keith learns that Lance spoke Spanish before he spoke English. He learns that he broke his wrist slipping off the pier when he was eight and dislocated a shoulder falling off of a roof when he was twelve.

Keith listens to stories about Veronica, who is both terrible and terribly beautiful, who once slammed and broke a boy’s nose against a table for insisting that she belonged in a kitchen. He shyly entertains the idea of meeting Lance’s mother, who he speaks of passingly, but when he does, his voice is warm and his eyes are rimmed with love.

Keith imagines the grand mango tree living in Lance’s backyard, blooming with fruit and protecting laughing, barefoot children from the sun.

 

* * *

 

Space is full of stars, but even Lance knows that stars are but dead suns that have burned themselves out, reducing their quest to a voyage through corpses strung up on string.

It’s a warning, in a way, to pass by so many graves without stop. They’re sailing into an abyss, and they’ll burn themselves out someday.

Months or miles more of space, and he really is going to run screaming into it.

 

* * *

 

“So, I’ve been thinking…” Lance begins.

“Oh, no,” says Keith.

“We should get a dog.”

“Oh, no,” says Keith.

“It was just a thought.” Lance’s voice replies easily, like he was expecting the answer. For whatever reason, he doesn’t press it, and the slight noise indicates him settling back in his seat, crossing his hands behind his head.

Keith wonders where that thought came from - right now, he wouldn’t put it past any of his friends to forget to feed themselves, much else take care of a dog. And where would they find one out in space, anyway?

He frowns at the planet ahead of them, red and blue and brown and white swirled across its surface like a marble. It looks distinctly familiar, he realizes with a sudden chill - not quite right, of course, and light years away, but it’s close enough. His eyes flicker up at Pidge’s synopsis - _suitable landing conditions. The atmosphere is safe; the air is slightly thinner, but not enough to deprive significant oxygen flow to the brain. High rainfall. Variety in population, relatively dormant._

We’re taking a break, Keith rationalizes. What’s the harm?

“Follow me,” he says. “We’re landing.”

“For what?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Exploring? Maybe we’ll find you a dog.”

 

* * *

 

They circle over an open field of what looks like grass, admittedly more neon than he would have thought from a distance. Lance is out of Red and sprinting across the field towards Blue, a broad grin on his face, so he doesn’t quite mind.

Unfortunately, Keith could not possibly have chosen a worse time to land. The effect of his grand, romantic gesture is dampened by the fact that mere minutes after they make contact with the ground, the sky opens up and thunderclouds roll onto the horizon.

Next to him, Lance’s eyes widen.

The air is static all around them, and the hair on the back of Keith’s neck stands on end. His fight or flight instinct is brewing inside his gut, and for once, the flight instinct seems to be winning. He cautiously reaches for Lance’s elbow, ready to drag him from the open field and back to shelter.

“C’mon. It feels like it’s about to -”

 _Storm_ , Keith is about to finish, but Lance stands up straighter, eyes alight with boyish excitement.

“Rain. It’s gonna rain, isn’t it?” he grins, anticipation creeping into his voice, and Keith doesn’t have time to agree before a tree several feet away from them is illuminated, frozen in white light, and the sky splits itself in half. Keith almost screams.

Lance does not share this alarm. Instead, he grabs Keith’s wrist without looking back and charges forward, whooping in drunken delight as he goes, tearing through the grass and towards the great shadow of clouds broiling in the sky. Keith doesn’t think, he only follows and feels as though he has no choice.

“Lance, what the hell -!” he manages hoarsely, but Lance only looks back and laughs. Ahead, the horizon darkens, and the clouds sweep over the weak remaining strains of sun until the sky is dark.

Great claps of thunder shake themselves free from the heavens, and Keith is scared to shit when the sky swells and shakes free of itself and heaves down great buckets of wet in cascades of roaring green and blue, emptying its contents into the ground - hard, fast, and all at once.

 

* * *

 

He’s never been so wet in his life. He’s soaked to the bone, and he’ll possibly never be dry again, not with rivulets of rain running around his ears and his mouth and pooling in his socks. It’s such a shock, the overabundance of  _water_ trickling down his face and eyelids, that he doesn’t even bother to blink the droplets that cling to his lashes out of his eyes, and ends up coughing and spluttering like an idiot.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Lance yells directly into his ear while the echo of rain bellows all around them and drowns out all noise, and Keith turns his head to look at him through his own blurring vision.

The thunder is a low, distant rumbling roar that approaches like the rolls of mountains, only Keith can’t see it, can only feel the slide of Lance’s hand against his own and the way his own skin clings to his bones.

Lance lets out a shout and tips his head back for joy, letting the rainwater pour into his mouth and spill out the sides like a fountain.

He closes his eyes and counts down the seconds until the light invades the dark once more.

 

* * *

 

They cram into their lions with water running down the sides of their armor in streams and their bodysuits clinging to their legs, and take off before the storm can escalate.

Keith yanks his helmet off his head, teeth chattering, and sets it on the dashboard, shaking his hair free and running a slick palm down the side of his face. The visor of his helmet is speckled with droplets, trickling over the control panels and onto the floor, but he doesn’t care. The faint ringing in his ears has subsided, and he feels half-drowned, half-alive. Lance’s laughter erupts from his comm, bright and fantastic laughter that’s full of joy and _relief_ that numbs Keith to the bone, even more than the cold.

“That was - that was just like Earth, wasn’t it?” Lance is chattering excitedly, sounding quite out of his mind. “The sound, the smell, the _feel -”_ he huffs out a breath, and Keith imagines him running a hand through his own hair, tilting his head back to his chair to gaze at the ceiling in wonder. “It wasn’t even, like, toxic rain, or orange, this time. It wasn’t literal rocks falling from the sky. It was like real, actual rain.”

His voice comes out muffled, like his face is buried in his hands.

“Yeah,” he says, sounding like gravel himself. “Yeah, it was.”

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, they argue.

Correction: often, they argue, but they rarely forget to pull their punches. They bicker, but it’s rarely a _fight._

“If you want to go back _home_ so badly, then why are you even _here?_ ”

“Why am _I_ here? You’re one to talk. You ran away!”

“We already had this conversation.”

“Have we, Keith? Because we’ve already established that you _care,_ and you _feel bad_ , and you’re not a fucking sociopath - congratulations on that, by the way - but that doesn’t change the fact that you still _left_ , and you think you can lecture _me_ about it! I have a family on Earth, and just because you -”

“Shut up.”

“Make me!”

“Get out.”

“ _You_ get out!”

“This is _my_ room, idiot.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

 

* * *

 

“Lance, are you...okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”

“Why are you looking up at the ceiling?”

“I want to cry, but my foundation was, like, forty-eight GAC. I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

 

* * *

 

It’s strange, the role reversal between the two.

Keith is the one who leaves on impulse, because he’s been left too many times before (a mother he has no memory of, a father who runs into a fire, the nameless surrogates who mean well, but don’t know what to do with this nine-year-old child who knows curse words better than his math and sciences) and it’s a learned reaction. Infants imprint on those around them, like ducks, which is why Keith credits Shiro for his guilt complex, but not much else.

He’s met too many good things.

Keith runs - from the desert he’s come to call his home, from the children he’s come to call his family, from a memory that comes to reclaim him. He never knows exactly where he’s going, only that he can’t stay. Keith wants to stay here, surrounded by mechanical lions and a universe that is too large and too infinite to give a damn about him anyway.

Because of course, he realizes bitterly, that was the plan all along, wasn’t it? Lance is goal-oriented in the long term, framing his decisions around the contingencies that Keith can’t see. Lance is always looking over his shoulder, aiming for Earth.  
Keith has grown used to the feeling of being left alone, and he thinks, _I’m all the way back to where I started._

He tries not to panic.

 

* * *

 

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Pidge says, while Allura looks on quietly, “and if he doesn’t treat you right by now, you’re gone.”

“I’m gone.” Lance repeats, nodding to himself. Allura frowns.

“You're gone!” Pidge cheers. “Now go chop his dick off.”

 

* * *

 

Lance, thankfully, does not chop Keith’s dick off. Pidge, however, seems ready to do it for him.

“Lance mentioned that you had a fight.”

“And?”

“If you hurt him, once we get back to Earth, I will staple dead birds to your bike.”

At Keith’s expression, Hunk cuts in.

“What she means is that Lance didn’t tell us what was wrong, but he’s pretty upset about whatever it was, and we think that you should probably talk to him about it. We don’t care who started it, we just want the two of you to be happy, okay? And to know that whatever it is, it’ll get resolved.”

Keith nods mutely, outwardly impassive. Internally, he’s quaking in his boots.

“Oh, and, if you hurt him again, I will stand three feet away and silently watch Pidge staple those birds to your bike without protest. Does that sound reasonable?”

“Yeah,” he nods, immensely sincere.

 

* * *

 

“You’re a _monster.”_

Lotor doesn’t even look up, and only examines his nails, idle as a bird.

“Come on, now, _really,_ I thought we’d moved past that,” he drawls lazily, and the goddamn bastard has the gall to sound _bored._

“You _killed_ and _exploited_ my people, used them - used _me -_ and for what? Means to an end?”

“I _saved_ your people, what was left of them.” Lotor corrects her, a cold smugness creeping into his voice. “And after that, they weren’t really yours, were they? No, my dear, they aren’t your subjects anymore. A few centuries pass, and you’d think that they’d grow out of it.” His eyes remain trained on his lap, but his mouth curves up in a wretched smirk that, weeks ago, Allura might’ve painted as attractive, but she sees it now for what it is. She spots the teeth glinting from behind his lips.

“You’re a liar.”

“And _you_ are a fool.”

_“Murderer!”_

“Philanthropist.”

“I think you’re _insane.”_ Her voice breaks off at the end, and so she half-mouths, half-whispers the last word in hopes that he’ll hear it, but it won’t resonate. It does, though, because his gaze jerks up and when his eyes snap open, sharp and crystal clear, and Allura is absolutely terrified.

“I’m not,” he tells her, gently, calmly, and her hands are shaking so badly that she doesn’t know where to put them, can’t even muster the strength to curl them into fists at her sides.

She's struck with a sudden memory of a twenty-year-old-Allura-who-wasn't, face to face with Lotor’s glassy, pupil-torn eyes. He sported a lunatic grin that split his face into two parts, both of which were equally terrifying; hell is not a place, Allura remembered, but a thing you carry with you.

It’s fitting, because at the moment, he looks as though he’s just returned and brought it back, kicking and screaming and clawing to rip its way from his chest. She hopes that’s it, hopes that it’s just an inferno that he’s lost himself in and it hasn’t just been _him_ this entire time.

(And she’s partially right, but only partially.)

 

* * *

 

“Are you satisfied? Don't you have anyone else to interrogate?” he snaps, because he knows it’s not true, knows that he’s all alone in this vast, empty space, and the self-destructive part of him that he never knew existed wishes that they’d left him behind, a floating corpse frosted over in space. “You must not have the gall, that’s it. You’re not _brave_ enough to kill me. I know you want to, Allura.”

Lotor’s fucking _done_ with this - he wishes that they’d tossed him into a cell and left him to unwind in the dark, none of this sterile bullshit. Lotor’s not built for solitary confinement but he can damn well cope with it better than this. The faces pressed up against the walls change like clockwork, warped by more than the glass, but they come and go like reminders of a lost life.

(Did he really lose them, or was it the other way around?)

Now he doesn’t even know what’s real.

Allura crouches down, balancing on the balls of her feet and the spryness of her limbs, until she’s eye-level with Lotor through the glass. Lotor almost gags at the kindness in her expression.

 

* * *

 

It’s a surprise visit. Lotor’s guards - he remembers them all; they are fast, vicious, and completely at ease with fighting children. Their white flag is laced with hostility.

Acxa is the one to make contact first, and he’s ready to train his rifle on her when Keith interrupts, closes his own hand over Lance’s trigger finger. He doesn’t stop him, just shoots him a look that screams  _trust_ and  _reassurance_. Lance stands down, and Acxa stares him down.

“Hello?” He mouths at Keith, looking back and forth between the two alien women standing behind her and Acxa herself, impassive and unblinking. “Is this allowed?”

 _We should get Allura,_ he means. We can't trust them.

“ _Stop_ talking,” Zethrid barks. Keith puts a hand on his bayard, and Lance’s eyes narrow. He's never met a silence he can't fill.

“She saved my life,” says Keith with a resigned grit to his voice.

“We're not here to hurt you,” Acxa cuts in. Lance glares at her.

"Okay, Amanda."

"It's Acxa."

"Okay, Amanda."

 

* * *

 

Keith volunteers to keep an eye on the other two, quite selflessly, he might add. Lance looks properly betrayed, but that's what he gets when he provokes guests.

Ah, so this is what it feels like to be the levelheaded paladin.

 

* * *

 

 

I could be a killer if I wanted to, she thinks, eyeing the control pad outside of his cell.

All it would take was the flip of a single switch, enough to drain the oxygen from the room and make Lotor choke on nothing. He deserves it, for her people, for the lives lost in the process of him trying to save the universe.

She looks at his face through the glass, finally broken and snarling, still handsome, still haggard.

_Liar liar liar liar._

“I’m not a killer.”

_Lies lies lies lies._

That’s not a lie. She was born a princess first, and in the name of her father’s passing, she’ll always be a princess.

“And I’m not a monster. I was doing a service for the universe. What’s the life of ten to save a thousand in the name of -”

Allura shoots to her feet.

“You’re not _good,_ ” she says coldly, calmly, furiously. “You’re not _shit._ ”

Allura is not yet accustomed to Earth profanity, but the word feels good on her tongue, like a mouthful of marbles ready to be spit out. In that moment, she hopes it hurts him, hopes that Lotor wasn’t lying about everything, hopes that he could be hurt this entire time. “You’re just like your father.”

Lotor goes still at that, and she can see him so plainly that it does hurt. She relishes the feeling.

“I’m not -” he bites out, “I’m _nothing_ like him.” His eyes glint, malicious and beady, and Allura almost sobs with pride. Here he is, this part of him that he hides so well.

There is a chamber that has no room for anything but a black, beating heart and the legacy that a doomed father left behind.

Lotor seethes, wrecked by lunacy, looking as though he wants to rip her throat out with his teeth.

It’s courageous.

 

* * *

 

“It’s always a father, isn’t it?” Acxa says thoughtfully. It takes Lance a moment before he realizes that she’s addressing him.

“What?”

“Well, with mothers, it’s usually about being the right thing, doing the right thing, being the child she wants you to be. It’s all very subjective, of course, but the thing we want most is the love of our creators. But then,” she purses her lips, “with our fathers...it’s less about being the right thing, and more about being anything. Anything at all that _matters._ Anything that’s enough.”

His heart twitches at that, because Lance knows what the ache to matter feels like.

His own father was never a problem for Lance, who has known and loved him all his life without hesitation, and he’s grateful for it, this lack of distance, because he’s seen the devastation it brings and felt it like a wound.

Still.

“You’re saying that Lotor did all of this because he has daddy issues?” Lance scoffs. “That’s crazy.”

Acxa doesn’t appear offended, only deep in thought. Her brow creases slightly in the middle and she stares off into space. Lance can’t follow.

“He’s not like that, you know. He doesn’t feel things that way.” Acxa’s face goes smooth and motionless in a split second, and Lance can feel the fear creeping in.

“What, you’re saying he’s a sociopath?” Lance laughs nervously, high-pitched and uncertain.

Lotor is a lot of things - cunning, selfish, manipulative, half-crazed, but the only clinical thing about him is his superiority complex. That and homicidal urges, but he’s pretty sure that they were working though it.

Acxa shoots him another look that is distinctly unimpressed and - dare he say - _disappointed._ He frowns. He’s been getting a lot of those looks lately, and the last thing he needs this week is to feel reprimanded by someone he doesn’t even know.

“What I am saying is that whoever you are, you should know how - _unique -_ this is, how special you must be, to have reduced him to _this._ ”

“We didn’t have a choice,” he tells her, and that’s the truth. Maybe Lotor thought he was giving them options, thought that it was kinder not to shed his skin, but there was really little choice at all.

  

 

* * *

 

“We could take him,” she offers. Lance glances up at her, wary. This is what she came for, after all.

“What would you do with him? Kill him?”

“Would it put him out of his misery?” she asks seriously. Lance is a little shocked that she’s asking him, but her expression doesn’t waver.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” he answers honestly, and her lips thin a bit at that, but she doesn’t look surprised. Lotor does look miserable, going madder by the day, and what’s left of him inside the shell of his own mind and body is either tormented or twisted beyond recognition. “But on the off chance that -” his grip tightens on his bayard - “that it wouldn’t, then hell no.”

She shrugs. “Then we won’t.”

“Right…” Lance squints, skeptical. Something feels off, even more than it should. There has to be more to it than this. “What do we get in exchange?”

“In exchange?” She tilts her head, looking thoughtful. “In exchange for Prince Lotor, my crew and I will leave you alone. I swear.” Acxa folds her arms and looks him dead in the eye. “And I’ll tell you a secret. Three, even.”

Lance’s brows shoot upward.

“Super-secret-spy-espionage-stuff, huh?”

Acxa doesn’t laugh, but her stance does relax, marginally so. Her own brow lifts, and her eyes look less hard. “Something like that.”

Lance gets the distinct feeling that, for the time being, he’s speaking to a human instead of an intergalactic killing machine. “So, what’s the secret?”

“Do we _have_ a deal?”

“Would you kill him if he tried to escape?”

“Yes.” Her eyes narrow. “I don’t enjoy this, Paladin. Whatever you believe, I don’t want to kill Lotor, and I will do everything in my power to prevent that from happening unless absolutely necessary, but he needs to see justice for his crimes against the empire.”

“And the universe?”

She nods, stiff-lipped. “I swear it.”

 

* * *

 

“Tell me where to find the rest of them. Tell me how to find Altea. The Blade will tell me. Eventually.” Allura purses her lips. _But._ “I want to hear it from you.”

Lotor’s learned that love is this twisting, boundless, endless thing that constantly changes and fluctuates under the slightest and greatest of touches. He’s learned that many chase after it, like one chases after stars - but no one really knows what it is they are chasing after until they've caught it.

He thought that he did, he knows that he _did_ because Princess Allura is a lot of things (fierce, honorable, beautiful) but she’s not a liar.

“If I told you, would you consider releasing me?”

“Yes,” she says, like a liar.

 

* * *

 

“So, tell me about that secret of yours?” Lance asks finally, and the boulder begins inching up the hill again.

 

* * *

 

He storms into the containment room with Acxa hot on his heels. Behind the glass, Lotor’s eyes widen. Lance ignores him and addresses Allura.

“We need to go, now.”

Startled, Allura looks between Acxa and Lance in disbelief. “Lance, what are you talking about -”

“They’re going after Earth. We need to warn them.”

 

* * *

 

Allura grimaces, while Hunk and Pidge exchange looks. “The Galra Empire is destabilizing, and different factions are emerging, different groups of beliefs, strengths, and tactical ability. It’s on the verge of collapse. One thing that they can agree on is that Lotor is more than a lost cause; he needs to answer to his crimes, whether it be for allying with Voltron or conspiring against the Empire.” 

Lance crosses his arms, looking as though he’s ready to jump out of his own skin. “What they do know about our connection to Earth - that’s why they’re going after it. We have to warn them!”

“And we will, but I’ve been informed of - of another matter.” Allura’s voice sounds small. The hologram presentation switches, but Lance isn’t paying attention. He’s focused on Allura.

“What’s more important than getting back to Earth? We have to; it’s our _job._ ”

Pidge’s eyes widen in understanding. She recognizes Krolia’s briefing format.

“The Altean race is still alive,” Allura says imploringly, desperately. She remembers the earlier days when Voltron could barely form, back when she was just learning to reach out, searching for alliances against the Galra. “Lotor hadn’t gotten around to draining them all. There’s more than we thought there were, so many more - and I know how to find them.”

_I just need to find them._

_I need the Castle._

 

* * *

 

It’s decided that the Paladins will go to Earth, with minimal delays. Lance insists that they go _immediately_ and it pains Pidge to tell him that they need to slow down and check the facts - they need to rule out the possibility of an ambush, in which case, they need a plan.

Allura listens silently while Hunk’s eyes reach her, sympathetic. She doesn’t look back at him, she _can’t._

 

* * *

 

“I feel like I’ve failed them,” she admits, and suddenly she is a shame-faced child again, withdrawing a guilty hand from a cookie jar. In the moment, Kolivan makes her feel unbearably young and unfathomably inexperienced, even on a holographic screen. “They need to get to their own planet, I know that, but I need - _we_ need to find the Alteans that Lotor left alive.”

“How so?” Kolivan asks. His eyes remain focused on the distance stretched in front of them, his pupil-less gaze lost in the starry expanse. _I trusted Lotor. I brought him here. I put my friends in danger._ “The Black Paladin is, as I recall, the official leader of Voltron,” he reminds her.

“We have two crises at hand. I don’t want to choose between either of them”

“Alright,” he concedes. “What do you plan to do about it?

 

* * *

 

“Coran, I’m not going to Earth.”

“What?” Coran’s eyes snap up at her announcement, baffled. Allura carefully folds her hands and straightens up, squaring her shoulders. She does her best to look proud.

“There is unrest in the coalition. The universe needs someone to look towards, and if they can’t look to Voltron, they’ll have to look to me.”

Coran frowns.

“Princess, Voltron needs the Black Lion!”

“I know. But Earth isn’t meeting Voltron, not yet, anyway. They don’t need me right now.” Allura takes his hand delicately. _I need you to understand_. “We’ve already agreed that they’re stopping to see Pidge’s father first, before they confront the Garrison with the reality of extraterrestrial life. You are just as capable as I of addressing Earth.” At his disbelieving scoff, she shakes her head.

“I just...can’t go back to sleep, alright?”

“What are you talking about? The pods work fine - they’ll do, for the time being, and you know how Pidge gets when it comes to these things. She’ll sort it out, you’ll see.”

“That’s just it.” Allura bites her lip, stares out into the universe with liquid eyes. “The first time I closed my eyes, there was a war going on all around us, and I thought the world was on fire. My friends were dead, my people were dying, and Father - I didn’t want to think about. Then we woke up, and I hoped that it was over, that I could go home and somehow pretend that ten millennia hadn’t passed right under my nose.

“There was this part of me that - that was _grateful_ that I slept through it, that I didn’t have to _witness_ our people being slaughtered. It’s not, though, is it? The war is far from over, and my friends - people I loved - are dead.”

She closes her eyes to the memory. Faces flash in her mind, nameless people she clings to for posterity. Laughter rings in her head, the voices of her friends who died while she slept. “And - if what Krolia says is true, then there are still Alteans out there. Our people survived. We are not alone; I can feel it.”

When she opens her eyes, her knuckles are white, and Coran’s mind is elsewhere. If she tries, she can find him.

_It’s no use bringing back ghosts, not unless they can come back on their own._

“Is that enough?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps.”

She traces her hand along the railings, sadly, lovingly. She’s not sure what the Castle is anymore, whether it’s a relic or an heirloom. It’s not the future.

“I’ll be here. Kolivan has extended an invitation, and I have chosen to accept it on a platform of diplomatic interest. I'll meet up with you, I promise. It will be soon - the castleship can travel more quickly than the Lions, and I’ll be there to defend Earth, but I’m still the Princess of Altea. The universe isn’t safe, not yet. We have a lot of work to do.”

Coran puts his hand over hers, and says nothing more. He doesn’t need to.

Suddenly, she is nine years old and a princess again, off to explore the immeasurable unknown.

 

* * *

 

“This is Katie Holt, Paladin of the Green Voltron Lion. Broadcasting to Earth - does anyone copy? Over.”

 

* * *

 

“We’re going home,” Lance whispers to himself, in awe. “I’m going home,” he says again, and looks up to Keith, almost as if he needs to reaffirm that it’s real. Keith smiles and nods, which is enough for Lance, who flings himself into Keith’s arms like he's a lifeline. He holds him, not for the first time, feeling deliriously sick and in love.

“Yeah, you are,” Keith murmurs, staring straight ahead.

His heart breaks, just a little bit, because he’s positive that Lance loves Voltron (and is almost completely sure that Lance loves him), but he knows that it is an undeniable fact that Lance’s true, lost love is thousands of billions of trillions miles away.

Keith’s resentful, not of Lance, but of the thing that Lance loves most, because _Lance and Keith, neck and neck_ has become his way of life somehow, and he envisions a blaze of glory without end, just two comets hurtling through space.

The reality is that Lance’s real lifeline is Earth - some stupid rock in the sky that taught Lance how to love, but also gives him a purpose, a future with a destination. Keith won’t fault him for that, but he doesn’t blame himself for not sharing the same sentiment, because how can he?

Keith’s home is wandering through space, belonging to no one and nothing.

Lance? Lance has roots.

They go deeper than Keith’s desperation does.

 

* * *

 

“Lance -” he starts, and stops himself.

“Yeah?”

“Never mind.”

Sometimes he says  _Lance_ and means  _idiot._

Sometimes he says  _Lance_ , and means  _stay._

 

* * *

 

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s my new friend.” Pidge grunts, not looking up. Lance shoots a worried look at Keith, who throws his hands up like _what do you expect me to do about it?_

“Really? 'Cause it looks like a bunch of knives on a pinwheel.”

Pidge’s expression is withering, and she finally tears her eyes away from the bench, revealing the streak of grease against her jaw. “I spent ten hours on this, Lance. Get away from me.”

“Could you please put down the robot?” Allura intervenes, carefully avoiding eye contact with the bot, which whirrs menacingly, like an electric fan without a cage. Lance takes a step back.

“It’s not a robot, it’s my friend. Right, Rover 2.0?”

Rover 2.0 clicks aggressively.

“What did it say?” Lance asks, fearful. Pidge shrugs, turning her attention back to the tools in her hands.

“He just agreed with me.”

“Ten hours alone, and you decide to make sentient life out of graphing calculators?”

“I also finished the designs for the new pods,” she mumbles, gesturing vaguely to the left. “The blueprint’s finished, and Hunk already looked them over. We’ll be good to go in a day or two.” She slides the blueprints toward Hunk.

“I can’t capture every feature that Altean technology has to offer in less than seventy-two hours," she continues, "but I can design a pod that’ll cover basic injuries. It would be a slower process, for sure, but the most important feature is making sure that our bodies will be kept in suspended animation for an appropriate amount of time - we won’t wake up too soon or too fast, depending on our arrival time. The most important thing is that our bodies can withstand the speed - we should be protected, but just in case…”

 

* * *

 

The pods are, as it turns out, less of glass boxes and more of an elaborate security system that monitors their vitals while simultaneously keeping them in cryosleep stasis. Lance would’ve been more impressed if the only visible change besides the modifications to their beds was more than a glorified febreeze ventilator.

He opens his mouth to say so, but a loud sneeze interrupts him, and Hunk jumps backwards from where he’s inspecting the vents close up, jerking away from the white sanitation spray that flies out.

" _Oh_ my god, it just got in my anterior chamber!”

Pidge is at his side immediately.

“Fuck, is your retina okay?”

“Why can’t you guys say _eyes,_ like normal people?”

Pidge spins around to glare at him.

“Why can’t you follow simple vocal directions? The cleaning systems are activated through vocal signals, and maybe -”

“Maybe next time you should open your ears, because I didn’t even say anything!” he insists. “It was Keith!”

“I _sneezed!_ ”

“This is supposed to be a trial run!” Pidge howls.

“Yeah, well, it’s not my fault Keith got space herpes and is sneezing his - his _germs_ all over the place.”

“I do _not_ have herpes!” Keith growls.

“Besides, if Keith got herpes, then who would he have gotten it from?” Hunk adds, rubbing his eyes. Pidge snorts.

“More like, who would he give it to? _Lance,”_ she coughs under her breath, before looking disgusted at herself.

“Better herpes than pregnancy,” Keith mutters under his breath, to which Hunk bristles.

“That is _not_ correct, because according to the _Encyclopaedia of Pregnancy and_ -”

“I don’t need to hear this.”

“And what exactly was it that prepared you for the risks and drawbacks of premarital pregnancies?

“I don’t know, a lifetime of abandonment issues?” Keith snaps, too embarrassed to even think about Shiro’s vague attempt at a sex talk, Krolia’s enthusiastic recounting of breeding rituals, and Coran’s blunt yet thorough lecture about the latent (and thankfully nonexistent, in his case) threat of interspecies offspring.

“Oh, so _now_ you’re self-aware -”

“Can we just get back to the matter at hand?” Allura sighs. “Pidge, does the disinfectant work?”

“Of course it does. It’s not designed to be toxic, and unless Hunk’s eyes starts getting convulsions -” she sneaks a glance at Hunk, then hastily looks away - “then I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Positively. Everything will be _just_ fine.”

Pidge nods slowly, and Keith rejoices in the fact that _his_ lion is Blue, and this is all Allura’s problem now.

 

* * *

 

“He made me laugh,” she recounts. “He made me laugh all the time, I just didn’t show it.”

Krolia tells him stories, sometimes. Usually, it’s about her time in the desert.

It’s odd, because it’s his father who bathed him, his father who nursed him, and his father who raised him as best he could, despite the fact that he was clearly not designed to rear a child alone. It was just the two of them, and this mollified him for a time.

It’s odd, because it’s hard to remember the father he knew as a child and the father that Krolia knew, and view them as a single being.

“What happened to him, Keith?” she asks.

“There was...a fire. He got the call, and ran out one night.”

Keith was nearly asleep then, groggy and small and not capable of doing much of anything. If he had been, if he’d been alert and on his feet and had known the future, he might have tried to stop him, tried to plead with him to stay.

Keith was none of those things.

He wonders, sometimes, if his father would have hesitated for even a moment, had he known. No, of course not.

Shiro wouldn’t have. Keith wouldn’t have.

Lance wouldn’t have, either, the voice in the back of his mind reminds him. Lance, who has thrown himself into explosions and taken shrapnel for someone he’d just met. Lance is many things, deeply insecure being one of them, but when it comes down to saving people or saving himself, he doesn’t doubt himself.

Lance would never do that; Keith is supposed to be the reckless, slightly unstable one, unsure of where he came from and, even more so, of where he’s going.

 

* * *

 

“And the clone?”

“Kuron’s staying on the ship with Allura. Kolivan says that the Blade wants to take a better look at him.”

“You’ll be safe?” Krolia asks, although she knows the answer. Never. Keith nods affirmative. “You’ll take care of Lance, obviously.”

He gives her a thin smile, and she ruffles his hair.

“Say hello to Earth for me.”

Krolia leans over and kisses him on the forehead, dry and brief, and then she’s gone.

 

* * *

  

The nights leading up to their departure are thick with tension, so thick that Keith can taste the air.

Pidge hasn’t put her computer down since he last saw her, and her fingers fly across the keyboard nonstop.

Hunk is busy packing away utensils, humming as he does so.

Somehow, Lance sleeps like the dead, driven and content with his anticipation. Keith wasn’t expecting this, since Lance’s excitement usually threatens to eat him alive, but a switch must’ve went off somewhere along the road, as if he is anchored by the pull of  _home_.

Keith has become a lonely bedfellow.

Now he’s staring at the ceiling, unseeing, evading sleep without trying. An odd feeling has taken hold in the pit of his stomach, and it’s gnawing at his insides.

“G’night,” he begs in a whisper that frays and cracks at the edges. “Good night, Lance.”

Keith holds him tight, tight enough that he’s sure that it’ll leave bruises in the shape of his fingerprints (and ordinarily, Keith wouldn’t want to hurt him, never, but a part of him thinks that if he leaves a mark that matters, then he will never leave Lance).

 

* * *

 

He can feel Red’s hum deep in his bones, a ballad of some kind that reminds him of comets rattling through asteroid belts and of the reflection of the sun, setting fire to the surface of the sea.

Lance opens the door, closes it, and sinks onto the bed. The pod door slides shut on its own accord.

He closes his eyes, and lets the universe pull him home.

 

* * *

 

 _Miles away, there lies a cave hidden deep in the distant corners of northern Japan, surrounded by the mountains._  
_The_ ikiryō _live in these parts, in the heart of the mountains, locked in a perpetual night, never to see the sun. The locals claim that the_ ikiryō _are detached souls of the living, merely existing in another plane._

 

* * *

 

Hunk wakes first, and stumbles into the cockpit, groggy and unfocused.

He takes one look at the view, and he nearly weeps for joy.

 

* * *

 

They know that they’re coming - Samuel has made sure of that. Tomorrow, four of five of the Paladins of Voltron and the Royal Advisor of Altea will have officially returned to Earth - living evidence that space is even larger than they once thought. Today, they land at the Holt’s residence for a non-artificial night’s rest and a brief moment of calm before the world potentially collapses in on itself.

They look like a high man’s fever dream, vividly colored mechanical lions descending from the sky, all headed towards the landing strip.

 

* * *

  _EARTH (PT)_

_3:45 AM_

 

 _"MOM!"_ Pidge cries, flying into the woman's arms with a shout of joy. The woman is tall and slender, and her cropped blonde hair is paler than Pidge's own, but her eyes are the same amber, and her face is wrecked with the same relief in Pidge's voice. She hugs her back tight, as if she'll never let go.

Mrs. Holt looks them in the eyes and thanks them, one by one, for keeping Katie safe in the middle of a war, and Lance can’t find the strength to say anything back, because he doesn’t know Katie, only knows a boy who is really a girl who laughs across the universe and reminds him of his family.

Mrs. Holt openly cries, and Lance turns away.

Keith lingers behind, looking less curious and more uncomfortable.

 

* * *

  _EARTH (PT)_

_10:39 PM_

 

Lance doesn’t want to sleep in this house.

It doesn’t have anything to do with Pidge - the Holts are kind and more than hospitable, and the house itself is lovely, set in warm, neutral tones, and making up for the mundanity of its shell by the sheer amount of eccentricities inside - its residents, for one, not to mention that every nook and cranny of the room has some hint of unnatural intellectual prowess.

Lance does not want to sleep in this house. It’s not that it’s empty - his entire team is with him, and it feels so strongly of Pidge Gunderson that after a brief tour, the rooms don’t feel particularly unfamiliar.

Still.

At home, his own bed creaks. It’s lived through a great many years, like most of the things in his house, and springs are just about ready to go. He’s had good times in that bed; some of which required him to lock his door, others of which were more habit than anything. Sometimes he’ll stay up late on a whim, with the sheets stripped to the bottom of the bed and tangled around his feet, imagining what it’d be like when he got into the Garrison.

He has memories in his bed, from when he’d gotten the worst of fevers and the sheets felt sweltering, like he was swaddled in hot coals, slick with sweat and staring at the swimming ceiling above his head.

Lance remembers flinging himself down one Monday night, face first, nearly blacking out from exhaustion. He’d just pulled an overnight shift, and he nearly suffocated himself with his own pillow when he thought of his biology test the next day, and what shit he was going to have to pull to get a passing grade.

Lance’s own bed creaks, and the sound is ingrained in his memory. The bed in the guest room is high-quality memory foam, expensive stuff, and Lance could get a perfect night’s sleep in this if he could just convince himself to close his eyes.

He doesn’t.

The wallpaper in the bathroom next door isn’t covered in painted handprints. The marks on the door frame don’t have his siblings’ names on them, following them from childhood and into adolescence.

Outside his window, their lawn is completely flat. The green grass is trimmed down to the rigidity of a golf course, and a single, lone maple tree disrupts the smooth planes of the yard.

It feels wrong, somehow, that he’s on here on Earth and not sleeping in his own bed. This is his planet, but this isn’t his home.

 

* * *

  _EARTH (PT)_

_10: 48 PM_

 

Lance might be going crazy. He’s not sure. It could be a possibility.

At the very least, he has the thought beforehand to shove his shoes back own as he creeps back down the stairs, slinks through the dining room like a thief stowing away in the night, pauses to cast one, long look at Keith’s sleeping form draped over the couch, and slips through the front door.

What is he doing? Where is he even going to go? Back to the red lion, he supposes, who is still successfully camouflaged outside the house, parked on the lawn like a giant, invisible, abandoned car. If he couldn’t feel Red, pulling him to _come out of the house_ like it has him on a leash, he wouldn’t even know it was there. He wouldn’t know that any of the Lions were there.

Lance stops in the middle, halfway to his lion and three fourths of the way to the cockpit in his mind, and really thinks about it. He knows why Red called him now, he knew it the moment he pulled back the covers and fled from the house that was not his home.

The night is warm, but refreshingly so. It’s easy to breathe. Lance cranes his head back and looks at the stars. They wink back at him, small and bright and unassuming. Red thrives best on instinct, on passion, drive, and implicit trust in what’s ahead. He knows why he’s out there.

Lance is standing frozen in the front yard like a ghost when he suddenly feels a hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t even have the energy to scream, but, as it turns out, he doesn’t have to.

It’s only Pidge, looking small and pale and unreal on the lawn. No matter what planet she’s on (or isn’t), it seems, Pidge will never sleep.

He opens his mouth to apologize - for walking outside in the middle of the night and standing in front of her house like a crazy person, maybe. To ask Pidge why she was awake at these hours, or how she knew that he’d left. Most likely, he opens his mouth to apologize for the plan barely formed in his head but dead set in his heart.

As it turns out, he doesn’t need to apologize, either, because Pidge understands missing family more than anyone (how could he forget that?), and only shakes her head, a little sad, a little sorry.

 

* * *

  _EARTH (PT)_

_11:12 PM_

 

For the first time in months, Keith dreams.

The last time he had a dream - a real, proper one - he’d been high on toxic gas from another planet and in a near state of comatose. This time it’s different, if only because he’s sleeping on a friend’s couch instead of a hospital bed, and he’s not about to become a vegetable without proper medical treatment.

The dream starts out the same as it did back then. It’s the same beach, the fine, white sand, and the wild, untamed joy he feels running under the same sun.

He follows Lance because that’s how it goes; Lance _does_ , and Keith _follows,_ it seems, even in a dream.

The sun is blinding - flat planes of white light in the sky - and it’s a little irritating, because although he doesn’t mind sun at all, it somehow devolves into something prodding him in the face - gentle, but insistent. Keith comes to and bats at his face half heartedly, cracking one eye open.

 _“Keith, Keith, wake up,”_ someone whispers.

“Fuck off,” he snaps.

Lance shakes Keith’s shoulder, resisting the urge to dump a water bottle over his head. Mrs. Holt would have a fit over the cushions if they got ruined.

 _“Keith,”_ the voice insists, louder this time, and he opens both eyes to the sound, squinting like a cat.

“Hello?” Keith groans, incoherent.

“Are you awake?” Lance’s face comes into focus, and Keith blinks the sleep out of his eyes. The blinds are drawn, but he can tell that it’s still night. Lance has a strange expression on his face, like he’s not quite sure about something, but he’s already made up his mind.

“Now I am. What time is it?”

Lance looks at him, really looks at him, and suddenly Keith sees him too, the boy under the sun.

“Keith, I want you to meet my family.”

 

* * *

  _EARTH (PT)_

_11:05 PM_

 

“Lance,” Pidge had whispered, “go.”

And so he did.

 

* * *

 

_Outside the mountains, far beyond the furthest borders of Japan and across a great sea, a voice calls out, searching. It comes from the stars._

_Within the cave, someone stirs, and raises a hand._

 

* * *

 

_EARTH (CDT)_

 

* * *

 

Beyond the line of trees, the sun slowly dies, falling below the horizon and into its grave. Gold bleeds into the thin imprint of the clouds trailing through the sky like vapors of smoke, and Keith thinks of a distant fire that threatens to engulf the world and burn the soil anew.  
Lance sits only just out of his line of vision, but Keith knows exactly where he is, and can see him in his mind’s eye.

He’s aware of Marco and Louis nearby, of the faint chattering that swells and turns sweet, taking up the empty spaces in the air. The knots of the rope hammock chafe against Keith’s exposed neck and elbows, but his head is propped up against the wooden brace at the top, and the Cuban heat is comfortably fading along with the sun.  
He could fall asleep like this.

“ _Al otro lado del agua, a través del océano azul profundo, bajo el cielo abierto…”_

Lance’s voice drifts across the open yard, calm and blue in the still of a dying day, and Keith smiles to himself.

“ _Te escucho en mis sueños. Siento tu susurro a través del mar…”_

Keith can hear the guitar in his mind, and he’s grateful for that, because he’s only just learned that imaginary things can be just as real as things that are tangible, and the unbelievable can become the absolute.

“ _Tengo suerte de haber estado donde he estado. Tengo suerte de volver a casa otra vez.”_

 

* * *

 

The chorus goes on and on, and the bird in Keith bursts free, goes screaming up into a clear blue sky, where there's nothing but space and sun as far as the eye can see.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

END

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

So the Voltron season 8 finale?? I AM CONFUSION, AMERICA, EXPLAIN. I’m so mixed and yet so upset, but I can still find a silver lining - but it’s more like a thread, bc I’m a mess and the show’s a mess and I don’t know if it’s good, or bad, or if I was just setting myself up to be disappointed in the first place, since my expectations were ridiculously high? There were brief, shining moments of hope scattered throughout, and I’m going to cling to them despite the fact that I’m pessimistic af.

Anyway, this isn’t a chapter update, but just a side note that I was considering ending this series where it was, because Lance and Keith were together and content, but I am no longer happy or content myself, so you can expect at least a fourth. I’m awful at writing characters who are happy, but since I’m a petty ass bitch, I’m going to make them happy if it’s the last thing I do.

 

Regardless, VLD was a wild ride.

See you soon.

**Author's Note:**

> _Notes_
> 
>   * The book Hunk nearly references is the _Encyclopaedia of Pregnancy and Birth_ by Janet Balaskas and Yehudi Gordon. 
>   * The song Lance sings at the end is a crappy google translation of “Lucky” by Colbie Caillat, simply because Jeremy Shada has a cover of it, and certain beginning lines conveniently fit with the themes of the narrative. 
>   * The Japanese term shiryō is essentially an evil ghost/spirit that haunts and possesses the living, and attempts to kill their loved ones to bring them to the other side. An ikiryō is a detached, living spirit that is not necessarily malicious, but can still take possession. 
>   * Bear in mind that present-day life in Cuba is not to be romanticized for various reasons; however, Lance is extremely homesick and VLD takes place in an alternate future, so.
>   * CDT = Cuba Daylight Time 
>   * PT = Pacific Time Zone 
>   * The vines have been significantly decreased, and I have, like, twenty deleted scenes that were originally going to be included, so I might add a second chapter with the memes that didn’t make the cut. 
> 

> 
> Please feel free to **leave a review** , because I honestly love those more than anything else, and I promise that I’ll read and respond to all of them. I have my own inhibitions about this piece in particular, especially compared to the first two, but I really do hope you enjoyed.
> 
> If you did, leave a kudo :)


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